Michael Wiegand

In 12 years as a marketer, Michael's experience has run the gamut from design, development, direct mail, multivariate testing, print and search. But his new flame is analytics. Outside of work, he enjoys the finer things: cooking, JRPGs, music and whiskey - in no particular order.

Articles by Michael Wiegand

Anybody who’s been in this business for a while knows their ABCs: Acquisition Behavior Conversion It’s built into Google Analytics, for God’s sake: And it’s a tried and true methodology for measuring. Problem is, we’re measuring to take action. If the lifecycle begins and ends with acquisition and conversion, we’re missing a lot of workflow… Read More

Last week, I gave a free webinar on measuring mid-funnel activity using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. If you missed it, here’s the recording: During the webinar, I made mention of several links and resources that would be available afterward. Here’s the link bundle containing everything: http://portent.co/measuring-intent If you don’t have time for either… Read More

Google brought Universal Analytics (UA) out of beta earlier this year in April. It’s ushered in an exciting new era where integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is possible. That kind of integration is the holy grail of web analytics — truly closed-loop reporting, from the time a visitor first hits your website, to when they become… Read More

If you’re a paid search professional and you’ve been within a stone’s throw of a computer in the last 48 hours, you’ve probably heard: they’re coming for your search query data. Search Engine Land broke the story, Google themselves confirmed it: “Today, we are extending our efforts to keep search secure by removing the query… Read More

You heard me right. Last Click Attribution (LCA) is dead. This isn’t one of those hoaxes like with Andy Kaufman or SEO. LCA was a doomed model for a number of reasons. But for me, it no longer applies to the world we live in now. And it barely applied before. LCA will only stay… Read More

I was the kid who sorted out Skittles by color. My favorite flavor was lime, which they’ve since changed to green apple — an atrocity if you ask me. That isn’t my point today, but I think it’s influenced how I work as a marketer. Google Analytics has done a lot of work around their… Read More

I know it’s a horribly dead horse-beaten topic now, but (not provided) is a bigger problem than ever for search engine marketers. If we obsess over it, we lose sight of more important parts of a campaign. If we don’t address it, the client thinks organic traffic on their bread and butter keywords is plummeting.… Read More

Last October before the big Product Listing Ads (PLA) transition, in my panicked wisdom, I crafted a PLA Dashboard. It wasn’t pretty, and there wasn’t much to it, but it did help me keep a better eye on my PLA campaigns and improve them short-term. The dashboard looked like this: Since then, Google Analytics has introduced a… Read More

A study of 27 small business accounts Professionals who’ve spent any time in paid search – at an agency or in-house – can tell you how much of a big deal Quality Score (QS) is to us in the industry. We base our strategies on it. We lie awake at night wondering how to improve… Read More

With all the talk about enhanced campaigns results in the last week—on PPC Hero, most notably—we were curious to see how they would fly with a well-known brand, both from a smartphone and tablet perspective. A quick enhanced campaigns case study The methodology: Chose 1 brand campaign, 1 non-brand campaign Established baseline of performance for… Read More

Portent PPC Google+ Hangouts This will serve as the pilot for Portent’s ongoing hangout series where we talk about paid search current events and give you our analysis and commentary. Today’s hangout topic: AdWords Enhanced Campaigns A new feature announced just recently by Google. It’s caused quite a hullabaloo in the industry, to say the… Read More

My daughter just turned 3. And aside from wondering where the devil the last few years of my life went, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make Christmas special for a girl whose birthday is in December. Charlie loves technology. My iPad 2 was instantly hers the moment I brought it home… Read More

If you’ve followed my blog musings in the last year or so at Portent, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a dashboard nut. My Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard post took off in ways I never imagined. (Thanks guys!) But here’s the thing: I was lying to you all – or misleading you, anyway. There… Read More

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen that Google Analytics (GA) announced a new beta called Shortcuts: The idea is you can save new report views you’ve just discovered or old report views that you revisit often. How Do I Make a Shortcut? Couldn’t be simpler, really.… Read More